The name extraction program was discontinued many years ago. Whatever problems are in Family Tree because of those activities are being gradually fixed by many people, and in my experience, there are far fewer of those problems now. There are certainly no new duplicates being added by Name Extraction at this point.mnfamily wrote: Sat Feb 07, 2026 9:45 pm It is VERY frustrating because the vast majority of these errors and duplicates come from Name Extraction. Those doing the extraction seem to do no checking for preexisting names.
This is a problem that has not gotten any better in the last decade or more.
Can those doing Name Extraction activities be taught a little better before they start?
That said, there are other reasons that current users add duplicates. One of the huge ongoing sources of duplicates is when people have large sets of genealogical data in other databases, such as the 300,000 names in PAF that your father generated. Your attention to detail is praiseworthy, as you "spend hours (and days) getting rid of errors, merging duplicates and so forth." Unfortunately, some users are not nearly so careful and simply add people to Family Tree without checking to see if they are already in the Tree. That process creates duplicates that someone will eventually have to find and fix.